Are men really stupid miscreants?

Are women smarter than men? Yet another study, produced by the industry that does nothing but supply dubious medical sound bites to infotainment producers, says so. “It’s official!” came the predictable response from various quarters within society. There is now scientific proof, these spectators gleefully proclaimed, that men are simple-minded idiots. No wonder men are always the stupidest creatures on any given sitcom. Clearly they deserve to be portrayed by society as dumber, as baser, as inferior. Why, science itself says so!

This jibes perfectly well with the narrative served to you nightly by the modern, news-driven medical research industry – which is forever telling us that men are brutish, awful creatures, predictably and regrettably oppressing others when they are not indulging their childish whims and lording their unfairly accumulated patriarchal authority over the rest of society. Women are harder hit financially by divorce than their pathetic, lonely former spouses, says one study. Salary negotiations hurt women more than they do men, says another. Men are animals who form their relationships based on sexual attraction – an attraction that (cue ominous music) isn’t returned. Even our brains, we are told, are in on the conspiracy, processing images of women differently than those of men, facilitating the objectification of women while presumably empowering the gloating male fiends who whistle and drool at their helpless female victims.

The most recent study supposedly “proving” superior female IQ is no different and accomplishes the same political and philosophical goals. From the start, the results of the study were distorted – and deliberately so. Scott Barry Kaufman, writing in Psychology Today, laments this misrepresentation. “Can we stop this madness please?” he writes. “[The study, conducted across five industrialized nations] found that women scored the lowest in Australia (99.5), but in the other four nations [their] scores varied from 100.5 to 101.5.” The conclusion was actually that women “certainly equaled men, and perhaps were slightly above. This has been distorted in the news [to the claim] that women are incredibly more intelligent than men. As you can see, this somewhat goes beyond what was claimed.”

What is the Intelligence Quotient, anyway? A number previously seen as evidence of male chauvinism is now being hailed as ironclad biological proof of female superiority. But IQ tests have always had significant limitations, including limited breadth of analysis and poor predictive capabilities. If we cannot define intelligence, we can hardly reduce it to a quantitative score.

Some analysis of this newest IQ data has attributed the rising IQ scores for women – which are said to be rising faster than those for men – to women’s superior ability to multitask. The problem is that women have no such superior multitasking talent. The Guardian quotes Cordelia Fine, author of “Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society and Neurosexism Create Difference,” in condemning the very notion of sex-determined differences in intelligence. “These cultural lores,” she says, referring to such myths of superiority, “which in popular hands can become nothing short of monstrous fiction, are standing in the way of greater sex equality – just as measures of skull volume, brain weight and neuron delicacy did in the past.”

That’s what such studies are: monstrous fictions. They are invariably based on surveys, relatively small sample groups and – most importantly – subjective evaluation of the results. The conclusions derived from correlations that are often weak and sometimes extremely sketchy are always driven by a sociopolitical agenda. The action line being forwarded is that some demographic group – a group NOT associated with the libs, with the leftists, with the radicals dominating the Democrats – is at fault, is inferior, is dumber, is less informed. These conclusions are touted as fact and repeated as axiom until they enter our popular culture, where they persist doggedly. Facts have never once changed a “passionate” liberal’s opinion; why should medical “studies,” sociological statistics and push-polled surveys be any different?

Yet for years we were told that it was not true that men were smarter than women just because men’s IQ scores were higher. The difference was attributed to some kind of disparity in society itself, whether in the input or in the means used to measure the outcome. A glassceiling held women back at work. Sexist test questions skewed results in school. The presence of boys in the classroom was holding back the girls because the girls were afraid of their brutish Y-chromosome-equipped counterparts. The alleged statistical evidence of male superiority was never taken as scientific proof that men truly were smarter; rather, it was proclaimed to be damning evidence of society’s hostility to women.

Today, society’s hostility is directed toward men – if we are to use the same measures and evaluate them the same way. Today’s men fill the ranks of the overwhelming number of combat deaths and 94 percent of industrial deaths. They comprise 76 percent of homicide deaths and 80 percent of suicides. They are the majority of rape victims throughout the world, owing to high rates of sexual assault in prisons and internationally. They receive custody of their children in only 16 percent of child custody cases, are the victims of rampant paternity fraud and receive unequal treatment (to their disadvantage) across a wide array of criminal cases. Thanks to disparities in health care and medical research, men die, on average, six years sooner than women. In every conceivable category of social achievement, in every measure of prosperity, women do better or are more upwardly mobile.

What, then, are we left to think? The only rational conclusion is that, no, there exists no scientific evidence of women’s superiority to men – in intelligence or in any other innate cognitive skill. There exists also no real evidence of an innate sex-based inferiority. There is, however, ample evidence of a desire to manufacture “proof” of a disparity. Doing so forwards the hateful agenda of liberals and radical feminists. These are men and women who desire not equality, but advantage, by whatever means and through whatever lies required.